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Deviousness `anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
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Sta.sh
But part of this is also my anti-theropod prejudices kicking in.
I find it ridiculous that theropod experts (specifically when it comes to the little birdy ones) make so many little hair-splitting distinctions between this raptor and that raptor, this parave and that parave, when so many of them look identical. And yet they have no problem with referring to Giraffatitan as "Brachiosaurus" brancai or with lumping Haplocanthosaurus into Suwassea or some other diplodocid. Paleontology as a whole has this problem, of splitting little birdy creatures known from plenty of complete, nearly identical slab-fossilized specimens into innumerable species and subgenera, but lumping far larger creatures together which have far more obvious differences between them on the basis of "ontogeny" or "regional variation". There's more variation between Sauroposeidon and Paluxysaurus for a single vertebra position than you see comparatively in the entire bodies of any two of these raptors! Yet in their infinite genius the various fan-radiated throngs of neo-Hornerite pseudo-mavericks go around lumping the amazingly huge and splitting the underwhelmingly small (and the bigger the dinosaur, the more room for variation and different morphologies in the specimen). It's no longer restricted to one person or school of colleagues, now it's like an epidemic that's raging out of control under many different names, the hypocritical splitting of anything little and fuzzy on the most minute of differences, and lumping of most things big and scaly on the basis of far scantier similarities. We have some folks at SVP trying to argue that Utahceratops is nothing more than a mature form of Kosmoceratops (and not being tactful about it either), meanwhile Maniraptoran species seem to be multiplying and fragmenting faster than evangelical church denimonations!
Seriously, when will folks decide how much of this kool-aid is enough? It's not a stretch to say that half of SVP would split Shaq and Danny DeVito into different genera if given the chance.
I'd say the point for them being non-congeneric is that they do not form a clade to the exclusion of all other dromaeosaurids in most analyses (i.e., all but Senter et al. (2012) and some glimpses at Andrea Cau's megamatrix). Intuitively, I'm at a loss for words how they could be parts of different lineages with some 70 million years of convergent evolution making them end up almost the same, but that's an argument from incredulity; the current Senter et al. and Cau matrices, being better sampled than earlier iterations, make a much better case for that.
Honestly, I've given up pretending that genera are real and that we should follow a crown bird- or mammal-like genericometer in non-avialan dinosaurs, but you just make me wish to do some lumping and splitting again
Probably different subspecies, but Velociraptor.